Saying something bad (or complaining) about your church should be like saying something bad about your spouse. There is a place for it, but the occasions for it should be rare and the audience should be chosen carefully.

1. So my second cousin-in-law, or my second cousin-in-law’s brother (I can’t remember, this happened like a decade ago or something – but it was a Kraakevik, I’m pretty sure about that) was at Target with . . . his wife? And he was trying to find her and he heard someone yelling ‘Marco!’ and he thought, “It’s my wife, trying to find me, doing the Marco Polo thing.” So he started responding according to custom: “Polo!”

And so it went back and forth until he came around a corner and found a woman who looked miffed to see that it was him and not her son whose real name, apparently, was ‘Marco’.

Writers, Let’s say you look at your rough draft and see that you began a sentence with ‘But’ and remember your grammar teacher saying that you should never do that. Resist the temptation to say, “I’ll just replace ‘but’ with ‘however’!”

‘However’ and ‘But’ aren’t interchangeable. They mean different things. Rewrite or just keep the ‘But’.

It’s been awhile since my last Song Meme. I thought I’d give it a go again.

We all have songs that bring us right back to a specific time in our lives or a certain situation or person. How about you?

What song brings you back to . . .

– A public school bus
– Being trapped in a situation where you have to listen to a song
– A failed romance
– A Road Trip
– Dating your current significant other
– Roller-skating
– Honeymoon
– A specific person (name them and the song)
– College
– Your parents
– Your kids
– (Fill in the blank)

Do them all (or most of them) or choose just 2 or 3 and tell us the stories

My Answers:
A Road Trip (trip to Chicago): Under the boardwalk – Bruce WillisDating your current significant other: All We Like Sheep – Handel’s Messiah (watching her sing it with the Minnesota Chorale)
A public school bus: (You Ain’t Worth) The Salt In My Tears – Martin Briley
A failed romance: Time is on my side – Rolling StonesRoller-skating: Pick one – Dancing Queen – Abba, or King Tut – Steve MartinCollege: Everybody Have Fun Tonight – Wang Chung

And the Stories –

Your Parents: Daydream Believer – Monkees
One of the few memories I have of my first dad was him trying to figure out the lyrics by what we sang after watching the reruns on TV. He’d have us sing a line and he tried to repeat back what he thought we were singing. It was sort of like the telephone game. I’m guessing we had many words wrong.

Being trapped in a situation where you have to listen to a song:
The Place – Novgorod, Russia.
The Date – June, 2005
The Event – Heading to the provincial courthouse to meet with the judge to gain permission to adopt our daughter Anna.
As you might imagine, this was a stressful morning, because all of our hopes could be thrown down if for some reason the judge didn’t think we were fit to take a 3 year old out of their country and into our home. And inexplicably, the driver of our car, who spoke very little American, chose to play (quite loudly, actually) I’ll Never Trust Myself Again (Actually its called Melt, by Monster Magnet) a very angsty, rough and depressing American song. It was not ideal. We were glad to get out of the car.

Over at my other blog, I just posted a list of poems from this blog that were all of the same type: Specific and detailed descriptions of places our family has been to on vacations with commentary on how these spots affected us.